Treating time as a series of nows annihilates past, present, and future alike

Evidence

TEMPORALITY is evidently an organized structure. The three so-called “elements” of time, past, present, and future, should not be considered as a collection of “givens” for us to sum up—for example, as an infinite series of “nows” in which some are not yet and others are no longer—but rather as the structured moments of an original synthesis. Otherwise we will immediately meet with this paradox: the past is no longer; the future is not yet; as for the instantaneous present, everyone knows that this does not exist at all but is the limit of an infinite division, like a point without dimension. Thus the whole series is annihilated and doubly so since the future “now,” for example, is a nothingness qua future and will be realized in nothingness when it passes on to the state of a present “now.” The only possible method by which to study temporality is to approach it as a totality which dominates its secondary structures and which confers on them their meaning. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 408

Categorization

• XREF: The paradox of time’s elements annihilating themselves echoes Augustine’s Confessions treatment and later Merleau-Ponty’s temporal synthesis — the structured-moments whole that dominates its parts. — connects to: Thinking the future beyond ‘what is to come’ dissolves time as ordered moments — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 210; Positing the future as plasticity displaces the future’s definition as a moment of time; Postmodern pastiche blurs the present into a timeless simulacral past — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 86 (+13 more)
• DEFINE: Defines temporality as an organized totality whose dimensions are only Unselbständig (non-self-standing) moments, not discrete givens.

Broader Connections

• Thinking the future beyond ‘what is to come’ dissolves time as ordered moments #corroborates (0.82) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 210
• The vulgar sequential conception of time erases all possibility of a genuinely surprising future #corroborates (0.80) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 77
• Positing the future as plasticity displaces the future’s definition as a moment of time #corroborates (0.75)
• Postmodern pastiche blurs the present into a timeless simulacral past #exemplifies (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 86
• Freedom can objectify its own past, rupturing temporal continuity with the instant #expands (0.72)